Medium to large enterprises today maintain sizable infrastructure inside their premises to support real-time voice, video, email and other collaboration services. Employees of today's enterprise are geographically dispersed and mobile. Enterprises are looking for a cost effective and flexible way of managing their communications infrastructure. Most of these services will end up in a cloud managed by third party companies going forward. Collaborative services deployed in the cloud like web meeting tools in your email are available today. The next step for this is to take all aspects of enterprise communications in to the cloud including voice. It has to be a elastic model where the enterprise can start the service at a low subscription levels and purchase capacity as they need it and would also allow enterprises to leverage legacy drangons(PBX etc) with out need for complete fork lift.

There are three different groups vying for this business carriers, old school enterprise equipment vendors and Internet gorillas.

All the carriers are building IMS like core networks and IMS platform is built to support real-time applications, Fixed Mobile Convergence, security and collaborative tools the enterprise needs. Additionally IMS would allow legacy enterprise premises equipment to me seamlessly plugged in. Carriers would want to leverage this IMS investment to attack this market. IMS is the carriers cloud.

Old school enterprise vendors would try the same using their existing hosted models that they already offer. The new internet gorillas that do not believe in IMS or any carrier centric approach believe that all real-time services can be served over the top. You will see quite a few companies that will come to play in this space.

It is tug of war between carriers using IMS) that are trying to keep service control verses the cloud gang that is desperately trying to drag and integrate all the services in to their cloud . Either ways it will be a new paradigm shift in how enterprise services are delivered. The delay in IMS ecosystem coming together is something that carriers need to be careful about. The clouds are gathering and I see tough competition for IMS going forward.